Plucked! Now Nobody Even Knows Where Bella Maryanovsky Is

Background

The reappearance of Henry Kissinger as a top adviser in the White House dredges up horrors that have long been buried by time – but which are still fresh in the scarred hearts of millions of people. It reminds us of the complicity and cooperation of the American political elite in the South American mass murder campaign known as "Operation Condor." This earlier "war on terror" – which reached its apogee on that other September 11 terrorist attack, in 1973, with the American-backed murder of Salvador Allende, Chile's democratically elected president – also featured unrestrained "unitary executive power" claiming the right to imprison and torture and permanently detain anyone arbitrarily declared a "terrorist" or "enemy of the state" on the most specious – or nonexistent – grounds.

The savagery and tyranny that Kissinger and his cohorts in the Nixon White House – including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and George H.W. Bush – helped visit upon South America is now coming home, brought to you by the same people, the same faction of rapacious, power-gaming, blood-spattered punks. As they have shown over and over and over again, for decades, from Vietnam to Argentina to Chile to Central America to Iraq, they know only one way to rule: by force, by fear, by lies, by loot, by lawlessness and death.

This same faction has contracted with Halliburton to build "emergency detention camps" set to hold tens of thousands of people. They have induced their bootlicking rubberstamps in Congress to vote its approval of unrestricted, arbitrary presidential power over the lives and liberties of every American – indeed, every person on earth. They have launched a war of aggression that has killed an estimated 250,000 innocent Iraqi civilians and more than 2,700 American soldiers as well.

Given everything they have already done, given the autocratic powers they have claimed for themselves and have had confirmed by Congress, given their until-now secret reliance on a war criminal directly complicit in the death of millions of people in Southeast Asia, where do you think this faction will draw the line in order to retain their power, their privilege, their dominance?

There is no line for them. There is no limit. History has proved this. And history is now circling back on the United States, preparing to visit upon us some of the same horrors that this same group has wrought upon other people.

Foreground

Here's the latest from Larisa Alexandrovna regarding her cousin, Bella Maryanovsky (click here for the background and some action ideas):

I am gonna write about this tonight.

They plucked her! ICE took her this evening.

They won't tell us where, they won't tell her where, they won't tell her attorney where.

She was allowed a call, she phoned her mother to say that she was being moved. She said she does not know when next she will speak with us.

What happened during Operation Condor is so horrific – all done in the name of the safety and security of "the nation" – that it is barely speakable. The torture included one of the Bush Administration’s favorite techniques – waterboarding – and many other methods. Families were forced to watch or listen to their love[d] ones being mutilated. Friends were required to conduct torture on those that they knew. Pregnant women were allowed to stay alive until their babies were born, then they were murdered. Their children were given to military families who adopted them.

In a New Yorker article a few years back, a former member of the Argentinian military recalled flights over the Atlantic where drugged and bound Argentinians, whose interrogation was finished, were thrown alive into the ocean. Bodies of the already killed were dumped into the Rio de la Plata, which divides Argentina and Uruguay.

Many Americans will say that this horror cannot happen in the United States, but they are wrong. Legally, as a result of the legislation passed in September, it is now quite possible.

Imagine Mahatma Gandhi arrested for engaging in satyagraha—the philosophy and action of nonviolent resistance—and disappeared to a torture dungeon. Under AETA, coupled with Bush’s detainee bill, all of this will not only be possible, it is more than likely a done deal, considering the long and sordid track record of the state.

In 1930, Gandhi initiated the Salt March to Dandi in opposition to the British salt tax. The British did not arrest Gandhi because he did not incite others to follow him. However, under the AETA, Gandhi would be considered a terrorist because his activity resulted in a “loss of profits” for the British Raj.

Well? Right. Me too. But I'm still going. How about you?

At the bottom of this post is a list of people you can call and/or write.

These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.

Wisdom

And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly: I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit. For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.